Building Trust: How Blogging Can Improve Customer Relationships

Trust is everything in the online world. Ask anyone and they will tell you that they trust online reviews. According to a recent study by Econsultancy, 61% of customers read and trust online reviews when making a purchase. It goes to show that building trust in an untrusting world is essential.

This guide is going to show you some of the reasons why blogging could be the key to building customer relationships. It doesn’t have to take up much of your time and such a simple change could make all the difference.

Be An Authority

The main benefit of blogging when it comes to customer relationships is that you are allowing yourself to become an authority on your chosen subject. The fact is that in the world of today you cannot become an authority simply by declaring yourself as one. Customers are more suspicious and they want to see you prove it.

By producing quality information that’s true and reliable in every blog, you are making sure that you can become that authority. This will take time to accomplish, but you are becoming reliable as a result. If you can be believed when it comes to what you publish on your blog, your target audience may very well believe you when you ask them to buy something.

Blogging remains one of the best ways to promote your brand in the SEO rankings. Google still wants relevant content at the top of its search engine. It doesn’t want lots of irrelevant content from three years ago, and thus they are going to prioritize current content.

By making sure that your SEO is up to scratch, you are enabling the customer relationship to happen in the first place. People are going to see you in the search rankings, and thus they are going to discover you.

Remember To Come Back

The customer relationship begins from the moment someone visits your website. But it’s not enough to make that first touch. You need to go further than that by encouraging people to come back for more. You need to stay on their minds or they are going to forget about you and look to one of your competitors.

One of the main reasons why people don’t return to a brand’s website is because it’s stagnant. They have no reason to come back because they’ve seen it all before. A blog gives them a reason to keep coming back for more. They know that every week or every two weeks there’s going to be a new piece of content for them to consume.

On the other hand, you also have your various social media feeds. Organic reach has been crippled on many platforms, including Facebook. It’s your duty to make sure that you give people a reason to come back manually. You can do this through blogging because, again, people know that you have a constant stream of fresh content.

And because social media is the single most important metric for SEO, you are gaining benefits in all forms.

Engagement

Due to the fact that blogs target pain points and they encourage customers to speak directly to you, you are directly influencing the relationship. A relationship can get better extremely quickly simply through speaking to one of your fans directly. But this is something that many businesses don’t do. They wait for it to happen through their products, which just isn’t good enough.

Blogging is an active way of encouraging people to connect with you. As long as you publish great content on a regular basis, you will have people speaking to you on both social media and directly on your website. According to Evercoach, 81% of U.S. online consumers trust the information on blogs. An increase in trust will help get your customers to let their guard down and engage with you.

Go out of your way to reply to them as soon as possible so they don’t forget about the conversation. Ask as many questions as you can.

Making Blogging Work For You

To make blogging work for you, it’s vital that you utilize a mix of evergreen and current content. Choose topics that really help customers and encourage them to speak. Test different forms of content to see what generates the best possible response.

This will take time to make blogging work for you, but if you can get it right it can pay dividends. Build a relationship with your customers today through the power of blogging.

AJ Agrawal is an entrepreneur and marketer who helps venture backed startups and Fortune 500 companies optimize their growth channels.